Fear of flying cross country

On Jun 27, 2:08 pm, 126Driver wrote:
I would like to fly more cross country flights but have to admit I
usually come up with a list of excuses for not going on any particular
day. The weather is never good enough, or I have a dinner engagement,
or my battery seems low, or something. Some of this is a general
concern about personal injury, but I think I am also just afraid of
landing out and having to put up with the inconvenience of a retrieve
and getting criticism from other pilots in my club. (I did some damage
to my glider on a land out last year and I have lost a lot of
confidence.) I thought I would get over this, but have not so far.
Has anybody else been through a period like this, and if so, how did
you work it out?


Some suggestions:

xc dual. This depends where you are; in my club (Chicago) it's as
simple as signing up the duo discus, grabbing an instructor or xc
pilot and going. Travel to a site with a good xc instruction program
will be well worth the substantial amount of money involved.

Welcome to xc flying. It's all about diagnosing your problems,
figuring out the solution, then practicing it. Clearly, you've figured
out that excessive fear due to your last landout is the problem. Now,
go to work on making decisions using the facts, not feelings about it.
It will take determined practice to recognize illogical fear (as
distinguished from perfectly logical fear) and ignoring it. "Getting
back on the horse" is important. Habituation is the answer. All of us
have had to wrestle with this kind of thing.

Why was there damage? Something else obviously went wrong that needs
fixing. When you fix that, you'll get confidence again. Did you leave
field choice until too late? Again, some dual is a good idea. Just
because everybody else learned xc alone with the map in one hand and
terror in the heart is no reason to keep doing it this way!

There is no such thing as cross-country flying, there is only local
flying to different landing sponts. Plan your cross-country flights so
you know you're always in safe landing zone, then say out loud "I'm
local to x", committing to landing at x if the need arises. Drive the
route and pick specific fields if that's what it takes so you are
really logically comfortable with landing.

If your club really will give you criticism for a well-flown and
planned landout on a reasonable cross-country day, change clubs! This
is not only unhelpful, it's unsafe. Lots of accidents have happened
because people stretched a glide back to the airport in fear of
getting yelled at. If you don't land out occasionally, (especially in
a 126!) you're not trying.

Don't wait forever for "really good days." You only get better at it
if you fly xc anytime you can reliably stay up.

John Cochrane BB

Everything John said...

Plan to land out on your next flight. Find a suitable field from the
ground, walk it, measure it, then go flying. At the end of the
(perhaps local) flight, land there. Of course, you'll need to line up
a crew, prepare the trailer, etc.

I flew a 1-26, long, long ago and I remember that every flight was
likely to end up with a landing not exactly where I had planned. That
was a big part of the fun of flying the ship - all the friends needed
to support me and share the ship so we could all crew for each other.

Work on your spot landing technique. If you can't get stopped EVERY
time within 5' of a predetermined spot that you choose prior to
turning final, if flying at the home airport, then you need some dual
instruction to determine why. At our club we had a requirement to
land over a barrier, then get stopped within 500' prior to taking the
1-26 XC. The barrier was a pair of 16' poles with a flag banner
stretched between them. The length was about 100' and a weak link was
placed in the flag line so it would break easily if snagged by the
glider.

Here's a YouTube video posted recently of a 1-26 landing at a model
airplane field that shows a well executed landing in a small field:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9g7lUZ506Zw

-Tom

5Z wrote:
Work on your spot landing technique. If you can't get stopped EVERY
time within 5' of a predetermined spot that you choose prior to
turning final, if flying at the home airport, then you need some dual
instruction to determine why.

I've heard other people suggest this, and I have to disagree. In my
opinion, what is important is consistently and controllably touching
down within 5 or 10 feet of a predetermined spot (plus having some
energy to spare, if you see something you don't like on final). During
an actual off field landing there are all kinds of ways one can stop,
but the chances of damage are minimized if you take advantage of as much
of the available length as you can.

At our club we had a requirement to
land over a barrier, then get stopped within 500' prior to taking the
1-26 XC.

A reasonable test, if properly organized, but not something to do on a
day to day basis...

Marc

Marc Ramsey wrote:

At our club we had a requirement to
land over a barrier, then get stopped within 500' prior to taking the
1-26 XC.

A reasonable test, if properly organized, but not something to do on a
day to day basis.


Why not?

I think we should do something similar, informally, on every
landing, where doing so does not conflict with other operational
requirements. If we don't set a standard of some sort for every
takeoff, every flight, every landing--how do we know what we can do,
whether we're making any progress, or even maintaining our skills?
After all, not having confidence in our abilities results in a
reluctance to fly XC.

Your suggestion that we focus on the touchdown point is very
important, but it is just part of the challenge. Getting stopped at
a certain point helps us to determine just how good a job we've done
of choosing the _right_ touchdown point, assessing the braking
available on a given surface, and the effects of slope and
vegetation on our roll-out distance.

Spot landings are fun and useful, but we need to know, and be able
to do, much more.


Jack

Jack wrote:
Marc Ramsey wrote:

At our club we had a requirement to
land over a barrier, then get stopped within 500' prior to taking the
1-26 XC.

A reasonable test, if properly organized, but not something to do on a
day to day basis.


Why not?

Because I've seen what happens when a newbie misjudges the distance it
will take to stop, and touches down a bit too late. This may be all
well and good if one has a large grass field, but not so nice if you're
operating on a runway with a staging area at the end, and other gliders
waiting to takeoff and land.

At Williams Soaring Center there are lines painted on the runway about
20 feet apart, far enough down the runway that an ASK-21 will just about
run out of momentum without braking by the time when it reaches the
staging area. A lot of us aim at a touchdown on a selected line every
flight, it's great practice, and there's plenty of margin for error.
Once you've executed a proper touchdown, how quickly you stop is a
mostly a function of how much damage you're willing to do to the glider...

Marc

On Jun 27, 10:19 pm, Marc Ramsey wrote:
Jack wrote:
Marc Ramsey wrote:

At our club we had a requirement to
land over a barrier, then get stopped within 500' prior to taking the
1-26 XC.
A reasonable test, if properly organized, but not something to do on a
day to day basis.
Why not?

Because I've seen what happens when a newbie misjudges the distance it
will take to stop, and touches down a bit too late. This may be all
well and good if one has a large grass field,

Wow.
This is the nicest thread, with the nicest people and contributions I
have seen on ras
in quite a while. Bravo guys, and I will pitch in a little also.

There is a difference in land out and
land - away - from - home.
A lot of the mental wigglies, and background peer noise can go away,
if you are willing to make and live with above-glide-slope discipline
to known
airports (or aeroretrievable places depending on your region of the
country).
Airport sized places reduce risk, and social complications.
Get an air tow home. For 50km flights, it may be cheaper than the
friends dinner's
and trailer and gas time.

My first XC flights were in 1-26s (not even mine), and my current XC
flights are
also mostly not in my own airframes. (Thank you to many folks.) I want
to take
extremely good care of the glider(s). I have many land aways. I have
few
landouts, as those are very risky to gliders in CA/NV territories.
All my landouts
have been on places I have walked with my sneakers before I flew
there.
(This might affect my access to pretty airframes?)

Do I stretch things? Not beyond glide discipline with adjustment for
wind
and margin for inefficiency for me and that day's glider. In 30
years, I've only been
seriously challenged on margin twice, and I go places a bunch, usually
in a
twin with a student.

I teach that you need to S.S.T.O.P.P. soaring and plan a good landing
from a
reasonable distance above a known landing spot.

Size(span) - how many lanes of traffic wide do you need? 1-26 about
four lanes, 15Mtr six lanes.
Size(length) - how many times long is it versus its width? That will
get you a pretty
good handle on sizes.

Slope - is there any? Prioritize uphill versus upwind for that
landing.

Texture - airport textures are good. Fields - color, pattern, shadows
tell us more info.
You may have to pick with furrows over into wind or slope.

Obstacles - as you make two or three complete circles around this
place.....
you have the opportunity to observe drift, and be on differing
radials for lighting
changes on fences, wires, trees, furrows, etc.

Point into Wind if you can.
Positive Points - think happy things about this place now that you
have inspected
it well and have a nice Place Picked to Touch, and to Halt.

The others told you, you need to know course and landable spots before
you
leave home. XC dual is always a good thing. Fly a route in an
airplane, and take
the edge off, or practice field evals from the plane, and go compare
data from the ground
after that route flight.

You need to be able to land accurately, always.
This means knowing your factors for adjustment of flare distance and
taxi distance.
(Which a Approach Speed, Approach Configuration (%spoilers),
headwind component,
slope, texture and braking ability of the machine.)

Yes, spot land the heck out of every landing. Pick your flaring place,
know your distance
in flare to a touch spot, and know your braking distance for your
touchdown attitude
and configuration. And for Mark and all of us, yeah, don't scare or
threaten
the home 'drome gnomes while you do this practice.

When you know you are in command of landings, and have a tug pilot
ready for a
breather away from local duty, and have a decent day and your
composure, leaving
won't be so bad. You'll have a great story to tell us in July.

Fly safely,

Cindy B

CindyASK wrote:
On Jun 27, 10:19 pm, Marc Ramsey wrote:

Jack wrote:

Marc Ramsey wrote:

At our club we had a requirement to
land over a barrier, then get stopped within 500' prior to taking the
1-26 XC.

A reasonable test, if properly organized, but not something to do on a
day to day basis.

Why not?

Because I've seen what happens when a newbie misjudges the distance it
will take to stop, and touches down a bit too late. This may be all
well and good if one has a large grass field,


Wow.
This is the nicest thread, with the nicest people and contributions I
have seen on ras
in quite a while. Bravo guys, and I will pitch in a little also.

There is a difference in land out and
land - away - from - home.
A lot of the mental wigglies, and background peer noise can go away,
if you are willing to make and live with above-glide-slope discipline
to known
airports (or aeroretrievable places depending on your region of the
country).
Airport sized places reduce risk, and social complications.
Get an air tow home. For 50km flights, it may be cheaper than the
friends dinner's
and trailer and gas time.

My first XC flights were in 1-26s (not even mine), and my current XC
flights are
also mostly not in my own airframes. (Thank you to many folks.) I want
to take
extremely good care of the glider(s). I have many land aways. I have
few
landouts, as those are very risky to gliders in CA/NV territories.
All my landouts
have been on places I have walked with my sneakers before I flew
there.
(This might affect my access to pretty airframes?)

Do I stretch things? Not beyond glide discipline with adjustment for
wind
and margin for inefficiency for me and that day's glider. In 30
years, I've only been
seriously challenged on margin twice, and I go places a bunch, usually
in a
twin with a student.

I teach that you need to S.S.T.O.P.P. soaring and plan a good landing
from a
reasonable distance above a known landing spot.

Size(span) - how many lanes of traffic wide do you need? 1-26 about
four lanes, 15Mtr six lanes.
Size(length) - how many times long is it versus its width? That will
get you a pretty
good handle on sizes.

Slope - is there any? Prioritize uphill versus upwind for that
landing.

Texture - airport textures are good. Fields - color, pattern, shadows
tell us more info.
You may have to pick with furrows over into wind or slope.

Obstacles - as you make two or three complete circles around this
place.....
you have the opportunity to observe drift, and be on differing
radials for lighting
changes on fences, wires, trees, furrows, etc.

Point into Wind if you can.
Positive Points - think happy things about this place now that you
have inspected
it well and have a nice Place Picked to Touch, and to Halt.

The others told you, you need to know course and landable spots before
you
leave home. XC dual is always a good thing. Fly a route in an
airplane, and take
the edge off, or practice field evals from the plane, and go compare
data from the ground
after that route flight.

You need to be able to land accurately, always.
This means knowing your factors for adjustment of flare distance and
taxi distance.
(Which a Approach Speed, Approach Configuration (%spoilers),
headwind component,
slope, texture and braking ability of the machine.)

Yes, spot land the heck out of every landing. Pick your flaring place,
know your distance
in flare to a touch spot, and know your braking distance for your
touchdown attitude
and configuration. And for Mark and all of us, yeah, don't scare or
threaten
the home 'drome gnomes while you do this practice.

When you know you are in command of landings, and have a tug pilot
ready for a
breather away from local duty, and have a decent day and your
composure, leaving
won't be so bad. You'll have a great story to tell us in July.

Fly safely,

Cindy B


Congrats on being sufficiently motivated to ask your original question,
and for having the gumption to do it. (Hmmm...methinks that sort of
goes for the very act of soaring, too!) As you know by now, a person
really CAN obtain useful information related to actual soaring on RAS!

My most general feedback is: "What everyone else has already said."

The only off-field-landing damage I've done (so far) was to
dirt-clod-poke-a-hole in my 1-26's fabric adjacent the skid on my
3rd-ever off-field landing. It came from choosing a nice,
chocolatey-brown, plowed field to land in. Key word 'plowed.' As in it
hadn't been disced or harrowed or raked or otherwise further tended to.
On short final it dawned on me the biggest clod in the field was about
to arrive. 1-26's safely let you make such beginner mistakes at minimal
cost and personal risk.

I'm probably dumber than Cindy, and have used a shorter
pre-off-field-landing checklist for decades. It's S*O*A*R.

S - Surface
O - Obstructions
A - Approach
R - Rectangle

If you implement each of these checks/actions sequentially and in an
un-rushed fashion, your OFL should be no less sweaty-palmed than a
routine landing at your home field. (Of course, your palms WILL sweat
more, but they won't *need* to! :-) )

SURFACE - I prioritize my OFL choices into 3 groups.
Priority 1 fields are those with *known* smooth, low-risk, essentially
level surfaces, of sufficient width for my wings and length for my
rollout. Essentially, these are recently harrowed agricultural fields,
whose furrows are not a factor in landing direction.

Priority 2 fields are everything not Priority 1 or Priority 3. You'll
note this includes airports, incidentally, as many have hungry lights
lusting for glider wingtips. (So I'm a cautious soaring coward. It
bothers me not one bit.) Priority 2 fields are the ones I work really,
REALLY hard in assessing, as they're the ones with the most unknowns I
have to identify and assess before willingly risking my ship by landing
on them.

Priority 3 fields are those any horizontal arrival may likely result in
considerable damage to plane and possibly self. They're 'no-brainers'
for me. I simply won't land on them, and give them no further thought
or attention once identifying and discarding them. Western prairie, for
example. Scary stuff IMHO..but not every pilot of retractable glass i
know agrees with me. Point is, YOU get to identify and set the risk
parameters within which you're willing to soar. Better, IMHO, to be an
OFL wimp than kicking yourself over a busted gear or tailboom from that
yucca you didn't notice, or the prairie dog hole/mound, or some
soil-encrusted rock that did its worst.

Books can be - and have been - written about how to assess and choose
field surfaces. Attempting conciseness on RAS is probably futile, so I
won't try. But if you choose a poor surface, and still implement the
rest of your checks perfectly, you run the risk of breaking the glider,
so surface analysis is crucial to any XC soaring pilot, regardless of
skill level or L/D.

OBSTRUCTIONS - As used in this checklist these are anything sticking up
from my chosen field, OR, things not there (as in dirt-free-zones of
critter holes). If you've chosen a good surface, identified any/all
potential obstructions and worked backward to identify the pattern
required to get you onto your field while avoiding the obstructions, the
next thing (still working backwards) is...

APPROACH - Here you're looking for "airborne gotchas!" NOT directly on
your field, e.g. bordering fences/trees/powerlines, hillocks, etc. The
"gotchas" aren't generally airborne, but if you are when one gets you,
it won't be pretty. This is an area I've found many beginners don't
genuinely appreciate. A starting/useful rule-of-thumb is you need to
multiply your necessary field length by 10 times the height of any
"gotcha." So that nice, comfy, 1,000' long disced field you're
eyeballing, suddenly becomes 50% shorter because of those 50' trees
surrounding it. Aren't you happy you're flying a 1-26, now?

RECTANGLE - Make every OFL pattern a full rectangle, for only by so
doing can you with (nearly 100%) certainty identify wind strength and
direction. (You DO want to land into the wind, don't you?) Also, it
gives you the best perspective(s) of your selected field you can get
short of walking it beforehand.

Two final things to ponder.
One - though you'll probably want to have successfully completed your
"SOA" assessments by 'some comfortable altitude' (in my case several
thousand feet, wry chuckle), human eyeballs are incapable of so doing.
What you'll conclude only through direct experience is you can
(generally) accurately conclude the "S" part by the time you're down to
~2k agl, the smaller "O" bits won't be satisfactorily identifiable until
the 1k-2k agl level, and you might in fact be assessing them still on
short final...depending... The "A" bits are (for me, anyway) generally
easy to assess, while still well above crosswind height. But you've
gotta be *checking* for them, or bad things can easily happen...
The general point is, if you do your worrying, fretting, assessing,
and decision-making above pattern height, by the time you're in the
pattern, you can relax and be reasonably certain you're about to make as
no-sweat a landing as you're used to making on your home airport.

Two - Paradoxically, THE most difficult time of day to assess fields
from aloft is when the soaring is likely to be best, i.e. when the sun
is high overhead. Why? Little help from shadows in assessing things
like field slopes, plant/obstruction heights, etc. So, delaying your
landing until as late as possible has a whole host of benefits. Yee hah!

In closing, if you can't consistently fly approaches to a pre-selected
landing 'spot' you need to lengthen your field choices accordingly.
IMHO, it's much more important to be able to fly a well coordinated and
speed-consistent pattern than it is to be able to arrive 'at a spot.'
The idea is to arrive horizontally at some pre-selected speed (i.e.
energy level), above a Priority One surface, heading upwind. Everything
else is secondary. Once you've attained consistency IN the pattern,
'the spot' eventually falls out in the wash.

Most of all...have FUN!!!

Regards,
Bob - wimpy - W.